400 Years On NYC's Oldest Street

The Bowery - its broad, crooked arc first traversed on foot by Native Americans over unknown centuries - remains New York City's oldest thoroughfare and one of the world's few streets whose name evokes meaning beyond a mere place on a map. Stretching 1.25 miles from Chatham Square to Cooper Square, 400 years of Euro-American history make the Bowery undisputedly the city's most architecturally diverse & historically significant streetscape, with building representing every decade since 1780.
Colonial Dutch bouwerij (farm) road; Manhattan's first Free Black settlement; George Washington's Revolution-era procession route; epicenter of 19th Century Irish-American political influence as well as German-American culture; the Bowery was also the site of Lincoln's famous anti-slavery speech. New York's first entertainment district, since the early 1800s, the Bowery has incubated uniquely American cultural expressions, including tap dance, minstrelsy, vaudeville, jazz, Abstract Expressionism, Beat literature, and punk rock.
The Bowery was a 19th century stomping ground for the working class, the Bowery Boys gang, gay New Yorkers and waves of Irish, Italian, Chinese, German and Jewish immigrants. Since the 20th century, it has served as a jewelry, lighting, and restaurant supply district; a base for the homeless,



and a live/work space for an influential community of cutting edge artists.
While the shiny, generic condos of recent overdevelopment consume rare & significant sites along the fabled thoroughfare, the Bowery's importance was recognized with listing in the National Register of Historic Places in 2013. Despite this honor and widely supported calls for preservation, this richly layered repository of social, economic, political, cultural and architectural history remains one of the country's most endangered historic places.
- Kerri Culhane, Architectural Historian

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NYC's Oldest Brick House
Barnum's First Big Bamboozle
High and Low Art
Stephen Foster
Gateway to Old Chinatown
The Bowery Boys
Lost New York Gem
The Bowery Theatre
George Washington Drank Here!
Americans of Chinese Ancestry

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